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PARTISAN REVIEW
We are poured out like water. Who will dance
The mast-lashed master of Leviathans
Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?
IV
When the whale's viscera go and the roll
Of its corruption overruns this world
Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Wood's Hole
And Martha's Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword
Whistle and fall and sink into the fat?
In the great ash-pit of Jehosaphat
The bones cry for
the~
blood of the white whale,
The fat-flukes arch and wamble about its ears,
The death-lance churns into the whale, and tears
The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a
flail
And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags
And rips the sperm-whale's midriff into rags,
Gobbets of blubber roll to wind and weather;
Sailor, ospreys go round the stoven timber
Where the morning stars sing out together,
Thunderheads shake the white surl and unlimber
Ordnance on the flag-nailed mast-head. Hide,
Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.
v
Our Lady of Walsingham
There once the penitents took off their shoes
And then walked barefoot the remaining mile;
And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file
Slowly along the munching English lane,
Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose
Track of your dragging pain.
The stream flows down under the druid tree,
Shiloah's whirlpools gurgle and make glad
The castle of God. Sailor, you were glad
And whistled
Sion
by that stream. But see:
Our Lady, too small for her canopy,
